From Siamese Calves to Marriage
I challenge anyone to find a better way to kick off a fabulous summer evening than reconnecting with an old friend and meeting a new one under the alter of a two-headed baby cow while enjoying peanut butter curry ice cream.
Seriously. I dare you.
Jon, Jim and I hit San Fran last night, taking in everything from sweet classic T-birds to breathtaking views of a fantastic city kissed by a pink orange sky. No other place I can recall, save perhaps for Basel, Switzerland, do you see such a natural eclectic mix of architecture. Wedding cake entrances squeezed between modern boxes of floor to ceiling windows and turn of the century Victorians. Somehow….it works.
Being fantastic hosts, my friends then took me to the famous Haight-Ashbury where I immediately felt the pull to grab a pair of bongos and start stringing flowers through my hair.
Like the architecture, the people in this neighborhood mismatch with equal levels of tasty insanity. From the beefy bartender and the stylish perfumed “sex in the city” types to the “spare a nugget” tweaker kids and a toothless woman who “lost her band” and seemed as though she’d been wandering the streets looking for them since 1969.
Within that atmosphere one becomes acutely aware of the assumptions that appearances create. The assumptions we make about what other’s appearances mean and those that others make of us. Some people seem to live at times in an effort to justify those outer appearances. The line between whether the appearance defines the person or the person defines the appearance becomes blurred. To borrow from marketing, it’s about packaging. And at the heart of it all are certain assumptions about what our packaging means about us.
While these adornments are interesting, they are so only in so far as they serve to define what’s inside. It’s when you sit down and peel away the intent behind the costume, the person underneath it all – the raisin bran inside the box, so to speak – that people and by proxy life becomes interesting. After all, no matter how sexy that box of cereal looks, your still going to be hungry unless you open it.
So it is in peeling away all of that packaging that allows for honest discussion. Instead of being Post Raisin Bran, you become a bin of cereal in the bulk section. Naked, exposed and totally fine with it sandwiched between the dried apricots and rice. Fortunately for me, Jim and Jon don’t have much pretense about them and it didn’t take long for us to find a comfortable place to get real.
Such was the process by which we launched into the topic of marriage.
On all sides of the issue of marriage there are strong opinions as to what it means. Is it a shortcut to forming a legal partnership of shared assets? Is it an antiquated construct of a patriarchal society rooted in a misguided understanding of human nature? Is it the spiritual completion of uniting two people so that each become stronger as a unit and better as individuals? Is it a means of establishing a baby processing company?
It’s easily both all and none of those things. I can’t in this moment declare how I would define marriage. What I can better attempt to define is the inspiration that ignites the idea of marriage. Namely, love.
And love, at it’s core, is a choice. It’s a choice not in the sense of who you love, but HOW you love.
It’s a choice because love in action is about people and people are flawed. Whether the object of one’s love is filling you with joy or making you crazy, you have a choice as to how to respond to them.
So, choosing to love means choosing not to say that biting comment that you know will hurt.
Choosing to love is being able to say the hardest two words in the world: “I’m wrong.”
Choosing to love is being able to sacrifice with no expectation of being awarded for it.
Love is it’s own reward.
Of course, we don’t always choose love. We can’t because we’re still people who are still flawed.
But we sure as hell can try. And when you see two people who love each other, especially two people who have a history of lifetimes together, growing together over time, healing from mistakes and conquering victories, you want to cheer for the noble goal of choosing love.
And in so far as we may choose love, it becomes apparent that even no choice is a choice. No action, an action. What we choose not to do has just as much impact on our ability to love as anything else.
So here I am, sharing a plate of fabulous fried plantains at the end of great night in a bar on the Haight with two people who make a million choices a day in both what they do and what they don’t do that demonstrate their love for each other. Their love is obvious and beautiful. It is real.
So inspired by love, we circle back to marriage and the choice people make to call each other “spouse.” Jon and Jim don’t want to get married. But they do want to be able to have the choice to not get married.
In so far as love is a choice, and in light of all of the choices Jim and John make every day to love each other, this is one they cannot make.
Is that important? It is to them. It is to a lot of people.
